


the river of insufferable sins

by quadrille



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Assassination Attempt(s), Banter, Body Horror, Complicated Relationships, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Gore, Harrow the Ninth Spoilers (Locked Tomb Trilogy), Immortality, Implied Sexual Content, Necromancy, Yuletide, Yuletide 2020, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:21:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28187610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quadrille/pseuds/quadrille
Summary: In the first few days after her second rebirth, with Cristabel’s heart beating like a furnace in her chest, her hatred of Augustine burns like a supernova.
Relationships: Augustine the First & John Gaius | Necrolord Prime, Augustine the First & Mercymorn the First (Locked Tomb Trilogy), Augustine the First/Mercymorn the First (Locked Tomb Trilogy), Mercymorn the First & John Gaius | Necrolord Prime
Comments: 9
Kudos: 35
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	the river of insufferable sins

**Author's Note:**

  * For [arbitrarily](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/gifts).



> Your letter touched on absolutely everything that I love, and sparked some serious inspiration for this canon, so I just had to start furiously scribbling some Mercy/Augustine for you as a random unprompted treat -- I hope it hits the mark!

_do then heaven and earth, which Thou hast made, and wherein Thou hast made me, contain Thee? or, because nothing which exists could exist without Thee, doth therefore whatever exists contain Thee?_

_— the confessions of saint augustine, book i_

===

The first time Mercymorn died, the rest of the world died too.

The whole planet itself was bucking in its death throes, in a blaze of rolling fire and the reek of nuclear fallout thick in the back of their throats and burning the Earth to ash. She woke again gasping, with John Gaius’ hands between her ribs: putting her back together piece-by-piece, like the world’s most complex jigsaw puzzle. His whole body was incandescent with power. The sun had gone out, and he had taken its place.

They fled the place that would eventually become known as the First House. The three of them, the survivors of the Resurrection, took up residence elsewhere while the radiation cooled. They were all new-found necromancers learning at his side and trying their hands at this nascent science-art-magic, but he was always the best and brightest of them. And so, together, they set about trying to crack the secret of immortality.

They’d need to, if they were going to wait for their planet to become livable again.

In the first few days after her second rebirth, with Cristabel’s heart beating like a furnace in her chest, her hatred of Augustine burns like a supernova.

She wakes sobbing, her hands curling in the empty sheets where her cavalier would have been. Should have been. She imagines she can feel her, sometimes, the whisper of her best friend’s voice and that bright, giddy smile — except she’s not, she’s dead, she’s dead and Mercy _ate her_ , and it’s all because Cristabel believed in this fucking cause. Believed in it too much, like a true fanatic, despite the fact that their Necrolord is nothing more than flesh and bone, and Mercy could have told her that, since she’d seen him clinging to a toilet and vomiting from a hangover years before the Resurrection. Gods aren’t supposed to get hangovers.

And yet, Cristabel still set down her sword and walked smiling into her own death.

They should have diminished that mythology a bit, before it sank in like this.

God is well-familiar with his Lyctors trying to kill each other, and this is why: when Mercymorn the First, Saint of Joy, Second Saint to Serve the King Undying, his fists and gestures, was still writhing on the pyre of Cristabel’s stormy eyes, she tried to murder Augustine the First over and over.

He was still reeling from the loss of Alfred, too; the man probably had some deep wellspring of grief himself, but he was a convenient lightning rod for her. He was somewhere she could deposit all her rage and hatred and sorrow, buried in the act of flaying his skin from his bones and watching it stitch back up in front of her, while his hand closes around her throat and he snarls, _“I lost my brother too, you know,”_ and she simply howls back, _“I don’t care, I **don’t care** —”_

Sometimes their little war is extraordinarily petty. It’s Mercy stomping hard on Augustine’s shoe, her high heel driving viciously into his instep, and Augustine hisses in pain. Sometimes, it’s him kicking her shin under the breakfast table, and their most merciful God casts his eyes up to the heavens and sighs, and says, “Children, _behave_.”

Cassiopeia always squirms and looks dreadfully uncomfortable whenever her siblings fall into one of these murderous tiffs, while Ulysses sips his coffee and exchanges a sardonic look with Augustine. Gideon just sits at the end of the table and broods, like he always does.

“At least let me finish my croissant before you get blood on the breakfast table,” John says, and he sounds long-suffering.

It’s only been twenty years. There are so many more to go.

The acquisition of Cytherea, their last aspirant, comes long after the rest of them have already coalesced as a group, and so this latest recruit is an item of intense curiosity. A few of them go up to the landing pad to watch the new arrival. Mercy’s standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Augustine, and for once, both of their attentions are entirely focused on something else. The young woman’s cavalier is striding off the shuttle with Cytherea slumped in her arms like a wilted flower, and the Emperor walks briskly after them.

“Do you think she’s going to survive?” Mercy asks.

Augustine looks startled at the fact that she’s actually addressing him; and perhaps she should’ve been surprised, too, except that she’s more intrigued by this newcomer. The rest of them have all been distracted lately, working on founding their Houses, claiming planets and setting tenets to last generations. (Mercy decided to give hers the epithet The Forgiving House. Sometimes she thinks she’s very funny.)

“John will get her through the process,” Augustine says.

“That wasn’t exactly my question. I don’t even have to touch her to tell you that her body’s already riddled with cancer — absolutely _rotten_ with it. Lyctorhood will stop her from getting any worse, but I don’t think it’ll get any better either. When it’s your own body coming apart at the cellular level like that, once the genetic template’s already gotten corrupted…”

She trails off into intellectual musing, the way they used to when they were all students knuckling their way through theorems in the labs. Augustine takes another drag off his cigarette, and they watch the dying woman disappear into Canaan House, and they wonder if she’ll live to be their new sister.

Cytherea does live, and she’s a lively, charming addition to Ulysses’ sexy parties, even if there’s a permanent pale sallowness to her skin and she sometimes coughs up blood in the middle of a laughing fit. She’s bought herself more time than she thought she had, and so for a while she’s effervescent, joyous. They all eat the beautiful desserts that Cassiopeia baked for them, and she and Cytherea do shots, before Cassy gives up and goes out to the balcony to be discreetly ill. Mercy sits at the dining table, her arms stubbornly crossed and her jaw set, while Augustine and Ulysses are _canoodling_ at the other end of the table. Samael is whispering something warm into Anastasia’s ear.

Once again, as always, Mercy wishes Cristabel were here instead of burning inside her ribcage. At least then she’d have someone to talk to, who doesn’t want to shove a tongue down her throat unprompted. At least then she’d know what to do with her hands, rather than gripping her wine glass with her fingers like an iron vise and staring down at her lap and counting the minutes until Augustine might be too distracted to tease her for slipping away. 

“Mercy,” Cyrus begins, “are you sure you wouldn’t be more comfortable outsi—”

It’s his kindness that undoes her. It always undoes her. She can deal with Augustine’s mockery far better than she can deal with any of the others starting to _pity_ her.

“No thank you!” she says instead, her voice a little shrill, and she slams back the last of her wine. “I’m fine here!!”

It’s when John comes to them all, his fingers interlaced and his eyes downcast and looking so awfully, awfully sorrowful to tell them about Anastasia’s death, that something finally doesn’t feel quite right.

“But Anastasia’s ten times smarter than I am,” Augustine blurts out. “I don’t understand how this is possible. She was on the verge of cracking the theorem, and so much neater than any of the rest of us had done it. How could this happen?”

“She over-thought it,” John says.

It nags at her, afterwards. Like there’s a piece of food caught between her teeth but she can’t dislodge it, no matter how she tries; she can’t put her finger on what could possibly be wrong about this, because it all sounds logical enough and John looks so _dreadfully sorry_ when he tells them about it. As if he just wants to immolate himself for not having saved her, for not having helped enough.

And who is she, to question God?

  


They’ve stopped celebrating birthdays, apart from Ulysses. You stop caring, really, once you get a few centuries in. 

  


They have always dealt in mutually-assured destruction. In the 887th year after the Resurrection, Mercymorn is returning from a visit to Eighth House when she discovers her shuttle has been sabotaged; when it re-enters the First House’s atmosphere, it’s about to go down screaming in a fiery blast, but her instincts kick in before her conscious mind does. She reaches out and seizes her poor attendants’ bodies; she disassembles them and builds a cocoon of springy muscle and viscera, cushioning herself for the crash-landing. It means the worst she suffers is a sprained ankle (easily healed in the blink of an eye) rather than complete disintegration.

She emerges from the ocean like some furious Venus rising from the froth of the sea, stomps up the slippery stone steps of Canaan House, and slams open the massive ornate doors, her peach hair dripping salt water on the flagstones. Augustine looks up from his espresso, and his expression is schooled into careful bemusement.

Mercy’s expression is not schooled. She is _livid_.

“I had to touch intestines!” she shrieks. “There was _bile_ from my _handmaiden’s gall bladder_ in my _hair_. Now I have to find new handmaidens! For fuck’s sake, Augustine!”

“Well done, you. It was a test of your reflexes.”

They go into glorious battle together, and for a while, the enmity is… not forgotten, but temporarily set aside. In a holding pattern. In limbo. Because there are greater things to concern themselves with, as Number Three bears down on them all gnashing teeth and eyeballs (“Eurgh. Are those teeth _on_ an eyeball?”), and Ulysses winds up wrestling it down through the stoma.

Mercy is angry, after that. After this loss of Ulysses, who she hadn’t even realised she’d miss, but it turns out he’s like a particularly annoying puppy but one you’d gotten rather used to. Her banter with Augustine is usually verbal, or him standing and _looming_ over her with his irritating height, or carefully overwrought assassination schemes on both their parts — but today, as they all return to the Mithraeum and set foot in its hallways again, she simply flings herself at him with an animal howl. Her fist collides with his jaw; his elbow shoves into her kidney; her arms scrabble for purchase against the lines of his ribs, she knees him in the groin, and they go scuffling and sliding across the floor in a scramble of limbs. No necromancy being used, either: just brute force, positively primeval, fighting with their own bodies and nothing else.

It’s a good thing no one’s here to see it, this undignified thing: two Lyctors wrestling, still covered in the eerie chill of the River, their souls heavy with the death of their brother-saint.

In the 1943rd year after the Resurrection, Mercymorn decides to distract him with her _wiles_.

(And that, perhaps, plants a seed and a thought: because he might be immortal and a God but their God is also just a man, isn’t he?)

It turns out the distraction is remarkably effective, largely due to how wholly unexpected it is. When Mercy shoves her mouth on Augustine’s mouth, he makes a muffled _mmwhuh?_ noise against her lips, and he’s stunned and surprised just long enough for her to reach out with her powers and wrench out his tongue, clawing her way down his throat, trying to throttle his lungs with layers of muscle tissue.

His blood splatters all over her. She should have worn red.

He heaves her off him and starts to cobble himself back together, and Mercy wipes her mouth clean. She hates leaving a mess. This latest ploy was messy, and not particularly well-thought-out, but she’s gratified by the look of abject anger on Augustine’s face once he re-shapes his jaw.

This, he hadn’t been expecting.

It’s kind of nice, knowing she can still surprise her favourite enemy.

They’re in the middle of the battlefield, slipping and drowning under the waves roiling beneath Number Six’s belly, and Augustine has, like a fool, like an _absolute twit_ , like a useless speck of cosmic dust, _passed out_. Useless!!

Mercy wades closer, her bright hair dripping black with some kind of awful awful ichor, and she finds him floating facedown in the River. She briefly and enthusiastically fantasises about holding him under for longer, until he drowns.

But Cyrus is here trying to draw the monster away from them like a pied piper, and yet they are still losing, and there’s a job needing doing. She rolls Augustine over, sees the bleeding mess of his intestines slippery with his own gore, and she promptly punches him in the wound.

He wakes up gasping, lungs heaving. “What the fuck!”

“Wake up,” she says crisply, like a school matron rousing a tardy child. “Stop sleeping on the _job_ , Augustine. I swear to John, if I have to do all of the work around here—”

“Don’t swear to John. You know he hates it when we do that.” He’s picking himself back up, leg knitting itself back together, his severed arteries re-forming as neatly as if someone’s pinched them shut. He grimaces, and fishes around in the dead beast beside him until he pulls his rapier free. He wipes it against his thigh, although ‘clean’ is more aspirational than achievable at the moment.

“Once more unto the breach?” he asks.

“I think Cyrus is doing something,” she says, glancing up with a squint. It seems abjectly impossible, but that writhing mass of scale and chitin above them is— turning _away_ from them, maybe? That massive colossal head swinging slowly to the side, its attention diverted as it starts to give chase.

Following one Lyctor. One brave, senselessly brave Lyctor, leading it headfirst into a black hole.

It’s been so many uncountable ages since the sexy parties.

She truly hated them with every inch and fiber of her being — hating them gave her _energy_ — but some part of her still misses them. Mostly because she misses the way Ulysses could make the others laugh: Cassiopeia laughs like the sun coming out behind clouds, the smile radiant across her whole face. Ulysses could always make John smile, too; that tight-lipped expression like their leader was trying to bite back the amusement, trying to look prim and clever and respectable and not at all like their old chum, and he failed every time.

She misses that.

Mercy’s staring down into her dinner dish, when she looks up and catches Augustine looking wistfully at Cyrus’ empty seat at the table, too. She wants to be scornful of it, this stupid sentimental streak — they’re, what, five thousand years old? they should be beyond sentiment — but when he looks up, he accidentally catches her eye too, and she hasn’t rearranged her expression yet. 

Whatever he sees there — she isn’t sure what it is — just makes him nod quietly, as if in understanding, and she wants to rip her own face off.

Cassiopeia is a hopeless optimist and capable of absolutely grand, innovative ideas — but this time, her idea doesn’t work. Mercy is the one closest to the epicenter when it happens; she’s standing right on the bank of the River, watching as one of her best and oldest friends is torn apart by thousands of ghosts.

She has some trouble sleeping, after that.

After Cassiopoeia’s death, they’re a more solemn group.

_And then there were four_ , she thinks, and against all her best wishes, her pre-Resurrection hindbrain supplies the rest of the sing-song: _One little Soldier Boy left all alone; He went out and hanged himself and then there were none._

The four last Lyctors are standing shoulder-to-shoulder at the funeral like an honour guard: the dying woman of the Seventh House shrinking into herself; their muscled brother-saint with his dour, quiet look, eyes closed; and her _other_ hated brother-saint, all comprising the Emperor’s last remaining fists and gestures. She wonders what a hand looks like after all its fingers have been lopped off. And it occurs to her that now she is trapped, truly trapped, with the literal worst people. (Except for God, of course. He is always the exception.)

“I wish it had been you,” she says to Augustine, spitting and spiteful, and his expression just looks pained.

“For once, Joy, we agree on something.”

In the 7000th year after the Resurrection, hatred starts to get boring.

They’re settled in one of the reading rooms in the Mithraeum; John is off somewhere, studying probably, and she wants to take a dig at Augustine but can’t even work up the energy to do it properly. When she tries to insult him, her insults are remarkably uncreative. After too much time spent with the same handful of people, it feels like you’ve said everything there is to say; like you’re just walking endlessly in circles, saying the same things over and over, doing the same damned things over and over. She takes a bit of pride in never trying to kill him the same way twice, but this means she hasn’t even tried in… gosh, it must be a hundred years now.

“I’m too tired to care, Joy,” Augustine says.

“I suppose it’s fitting. Your brother was the one all about Patience, wasn’t he?”

Even this, though, is a toothless and half-hearted attempt. The raw wound of Alfred has calcified and formed into hardened scar tissue, and even the invocation of Cristabel isn’t _quite_ the live-wire it used to be.

So in the end, neither of them can exactly explain how it happens. Just that they’ve done everything they can possibly think of to one another, except for this. And variety is, after all, the spice of life/undeath. Which is how, rather than insult her again, Augustine steps forward and crowds Mercymorn against the bookshelf instead.

She could rip off his jaw again, but she’s done that before. Instead, she lays her hand flat against his chest. “Is this a trap?” she asks fiercely, heart hammering in her chest (wondering distantly and mortifyingly if he can hear it). She’s not even sure why she asked. It’s not like he’d answer truthfully if it was.

Instead, her brother-saint just looks at her. “It’s either you or Gideon,” he says flatly, “and frankly, he’s no fun these days. He just wants to keep polishing his sword and doing military practice drills with the Cohort. Don’t you get _tired_ of it all, Mercy?”

She does. She does, she does.

So when he leans forward and kisses her, she lets it happen, and she does not rip his skin from his bones. She pauses long enough to wait for some kind of instant retribution — Augustine’s trap to spring, or perhaps some divine smiting from John ( _bonk! go to horny jail!_ ), or for the ancient ghost of Cristabel to wake up and claw its way out of her chest with the sheer indignity of _canoodling_ with Augustine Alfred Quinque.

But there’s no trap. Instead, he’s the same as he’s been for thousands of years: Augustine, the anchor and lodestone and one of the only dependable constants in her life. Augustine, hefting her up with his hands and settling her against the bookcase; her foot balances against one of the lower shelves, holding herself into place as he rucks up the edge of her robes. Mercymorn, her deft hands going straight for his trousers and unbuckling his belt. Mercymorn, biting his lip hard enough to draw blood, but she doesn’t do anything with it, doesn’t give him an aneurysm.

It’s fast and quick and impatient and unjoyful, but it is a _new_ sensation — his mouth against her breast, her head flung backwards, a pleasurable gasp in her throat — and she hadn’t known there could be anything new in these haunted hallways, after so many millennia.

Boredom, too, is what leads to them exchanging a glance and finally opening one of the BOE’s letters for the first time ever, rather than just throwing it right in the incinerator. Morbid curiosity, as always.

“What’s the harm in hearing what they have to say?” Augustine asks, with a shrug of one shoulder, and even she could tell that those sounded like famous last words.

The concept of heresy is very different when you live with God.

When God _personally_ chose to bring you back to life, from all the dead ten billion.

When you owe everything to God.

(Even, yes, the pain. You owe Cristabel’s death to God. She gave it gladly; you did not.)

_Dios apate, major._

“Well, this is disgusting,” Mercy says, looking down at the note scribbled on a piece of flimsy. She’s the flesh magician, and she still recoils from the prospect of what she’s eventually going to have to do. She’s going to eat that flimsy afterwards, too, to destroy all evidence of what they’re planning here.

Augustine takes another drag off his cigarette, and she’s staring at his fine-boned fingers, his neat perpetually-greying beard. She can’t decide if seducing God or killing God is the more frightening prospect here. The rest of the Lyctors always had their trysts in the old days, of course — tangled up in each other, hands on each other, it is awfully hard to go ten thousand years lonely — but he’s always remained fairly aloof from their entanglements. This one’s going to take time. This one’s going to take _centuries_ to get right, because if they fuck it up the first time, they’re not going to get a second shot at it.

They pull off their part of the plan perfectly (Mercy would expect no less), but the rest of it backfires, of course. The Saint of Duty is sent after Commander Wake like a vicious hunting hound, and they’re sitting on tenterhooks waiting for him to report back and to find out if she killed him, if the Locked Tomb has been opened and God’s battery severed, or if Gideon killed her, or if she went and fucking blabbed the entire plan to him and he’s going to come back and unleash apocalyptic divine retribution on them, and then God’s going to be down to just _one_ functioning Lyctor…

Mercy shouldn’t be here. But somehow she’s wound up in Augustine’s rooms, poking through his shelves, flipping through the books and scoffing at the dense web of theorems scribbled within the margins. Nerd. There’s an indefinable tension thrumming in her body, the anticipation of wondering if their ten thousand years are finally coming to an end in the next few days. She hates this.

“Do you think he’s going to catch her?” she asks.

“I think there’s no use in speculating.”

“We should’ve gone after them. Killed him. Made it look like Wake did it. We could’ve done it.” She’s fretting and knows that she’s fretting and she hates fretting.

“Have a drink, Joy. Have a cigarette. Calm down.”

“I am perfectly calm!!”

He just _looks_ at her, an eyebrow slightly tilted, and she can practically hear his skeptical voice in the back of her head. Ten thousand years will do that to you, even if it’s with someone you hate. Especially if. Mercy purses her lips thinly, bends the book back on its spine just to see the agonised expression that crosses his face, snaps the cover shut, and then marches over to him as if she’s going to war.

When she reaches out for him, he flinches backward. “What are you doing?”

“I’m not going to stop your heart or anything.”

“You have to admit it’s a reasonable concern. You could do that with a touch.”

“Don’t give me ideas.” But then she’s seized the neck of his shirt; Augustine always starts off the morning looking primly starched and pressed, but by evening his collar’s loosened and his sleeves rolled up to his elbow, cultivating an air of rumpled rakishness. It doesn’t do much for her — very little does anything for Mercymorn these days, except for memorising anatomy, planning her own death, and daydreaming about what killing Augustine would be like — but there is, too, a satisfaction in having someone who knows you this well. Who can sigh resignedly into your mouth as you clamber into his lap. As your fingers spread over the arch of his ribs and you think about how you could induce a coronary infarction with one fingertip trailing across his chest; how you could snuff out all his red blood cells with a blink, make them abandon whatever oxygen they’re carrying, leaving him suffocating on nothing. You could rearrange his internal organs and tie them into daisy-chains.

Mercymorn, the unlovable, is the smallest of God’s saints but she is also the most lethal. ( _Anatomy has too narrow an application. One would only really need it to kill Lyctors._ )

“You know the con’s over, right?” he asks, as she nips at his throat. The artery in his neck is throbbing beneath her teeth. She could run her tongue along it and close it off, and it would take no effort. “We don’t need to do this again.”

“There’s a difference between need and want. I don’t even particularly want to do this,” Mercy lies. “But I am _bored_ and _restless_ and we both _might die tomorrow_ and I need something to do that isn’t just pacing in circles, and so I might as well just do you instead.”

“This has always been your failing, Joy. You’re terrible at keeping yourself entertained. Go read a book instead.” His hand slides under her robes, up her bare thigh, slipping between her legs.

“I hate you.”

She stays in his bed for longer than she’d like, afterwards. Staring up at the ceiling and listening to the throb of her heart and his, daydreaming other creative ways to murder him, but the heat’s gone out of the project now. She can feel the warmth of his leg against hers, hear the steady rise-and-fall of his breath. He’s let himself _fall asleep_. Something about that feels extraordinarily insulting. This is foolishly brave of him, letting his guard down where she could still kill him.

Or maybe it’s just acceptance.

They’ve already thrown their lot in with each other, anyhow. If Gideon comes back armed with the truth, they’re both dead.

Mercy pinches the skin of his inner thigh, sharply, and Augustine wakes up with that slight sting of pain. “Ugh. What?”

“If he comes back, we should kill each other,” she says brightly. “Go out in a blaze of glory. Make it quick. I don’t like the idea of leaving my demise to _John and Gideon_. Yeurgh.”

“Are you honestly making a murder-suicide pact with me right now?”

“Just a suicide pact. Or, if it all works…” If they accomplish the unforgivable. How do they live with that? “We get everyone out of the system, and we do the thing, and then…” 

She can plan centuries for blasphemy, but can’t put blasphemy on her lips, apparently.

“If it all works,” Augustine says, and he’s moved closer, and she can’t decide if she wants to levitate right out of her skin and ascend screaming through the ceiling because of his hated touch on her, or if she wants to stay right here, right now, with his mouth against her throat, and it would almost be tender except for how he bites down _hard_ , and she tilts her head back and savours the sensation. If his teeth were sharper, it would have drawn blood. She can feel the bruise in her own bloodcells, rushing to the surface. All of her has settled into a low throb. “If it works,” he repeats, “then you can fling me facefirst into the nearest sun that isn’t Dominicus, and be done with it. I’m tired, Mercy.”

“I’ll go with you.” A hitched breath, as he works his way lower. “After all, it will be so _insufferably boring_ here after the sun goes out.”

But the Saint of Duty is still alive, and Commander Wake is dead, and the Locked Tomb is still closed. Very, very carefully, they do not look at each other. At the debriefing, the pair of them (and somehow, they’ve become a pair) keep their faces trained impassively forward like death masks, looking at their All-Giving God, the Necrolord Prime, His Celestial Kindness, the Emperor **Un-fucking-Dying**.

“It’s getting a little lonely around here,” Augustine says, his voice light and flippant. “I kept thinking about what if Wake had taken down our friend Gids here. I don’t exactly fancy our chances when the next Beast comes down the pike with our numbers so diminished. How about we summon the postulants, try to get a new crop in?”

They wait, for a long time, waiting to hear the possible pronouncement of their doom — but all John says is, “Yes, actually, I’d been thinking much the same. I suppose it’s about time for reinforcements. Can anyone remember where I left that letter template?”

She exhales, slowly.

When Mercy gazes upon their two new Lyctors, the only two who mastered the process, her nose crinkles in distaste and she says: “ _This_ is what you’ve given me to work with, Lord?”

“Yes, well, we do the best we can with what we’ve got,” the Lord says back.

They literally flip a coin to decide teacher assignments. Ianthe goes to Augustine, while Mercy gets that half-mad little twig girl. Mercy would be lying if she said she tried to be gentle with her at all. Mercymorn the First does not modulate her tone, doesn’t tiptoe on eggshells for anyone or anything; after ten thousand years, she can’t be bothered with aimless politeness, not even for God, let alone this insignificant infant.

The training is not going well.

She had, in perhaps an ill-advised bout of optimism, expected an entire crop of six brand-new Lyctors, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to refill their ranks, to be shining swords against their oncoming inevitable death by Resurrection Beast. Maybe if they reared enough of these children, they can all go out in self-sacrificial blazes of glory, take the last of the Beasts with them, and then John will drop this crusade and Mercy can finally take a goddamned nap.

Instead, it’s like they’ve inherited a sack of sickly kittens. She keeps contemplating if wringing their necks would be a kindness. The Eighth Saint won’t use one of her arms, and the Ninth Saint isn’t even a full Lyctor; can’t access the full depth and breadth of their powers, like a sputtering battery only half-connected. She keeps getting nosebleeds and fainting, like some consumptive wretch. Mercy keeps wanting to get her hands on her, to find out what’s aligned all wrong inside that delicate body.

“It’s honestly rather pathetic, the way the blonde fawns after you. Do you think you’d fuck her?” It’s hard to say whether it’s a strange indefinable kind of jealousy barbing Mercy’s words, or if it’s just her usual spiny thorns. “That’s _pedophilia_ , you know.”

He heaves a sigh. It’s been so very, very long since any of them had new saints. “She’s friendlier than you and more talkative than Gideon, so is it really any surprise that I like her company?”

“All I get is a _very surly_ waif. She can’t even lift that stupid sword she lugs around with her everywhere.”

After Mercy murders God, Augustine drops the Mithraeum out of the River, back to reality.

She’s already clutching his shirt and buried her face against his chest, listening to the comforting beat of his terrible heart. Only a few minutes left, now. They don’t have time to get anyone out, nor go immolate themselves together in another sun, so they’ll just have to ride out the end of this one together, then. Both of them instinctively, automatically reach out to each other — it has been over a myriad since she was a child or since she sought comfort (her hot tears against Cristabel’s shoulder), but she’s seeking comfort now, at the end of things. Her hand clasps in his and Augustine’s grip tightens, his thumb jotting against hers.

And they wait for the sun to swallow them whole. For the black hole to form, like the stoma, to emerge ravenous and devour the entirety of the system and all the people within it. Imagining that abyss. It isn’t the quiet grave they envisioned for themselves, but then again, they’ve always been the unquiet dead. Living on borrowed time.

Augustine reflexively closes his eyes, flinching, while Mercy stares fixedly at that horizon.

And they wait, and they wait.

But.

Dominicus does not go supernova. Dominicus does not transform into an all-consuming black hole. It would presumably take some time, but not _this long_. For an inane moment, Mercy feels like she should be tapping her foot and eyeing her wristwatch. Finally, Augustine opens his eyes again and looks.

“Well, now I feel like a ninny,” he says. He casts his eyes around, looking for the others, who he’d practically forgotten. There’s Ianthe. Harrow’s body with Wake’s golden-eyed child in it. Gideon the First, looking stolid and impassive as ever, letting this newest development roll over him. And where did he get those stupid sunglasses? Why? Why did he choose _now_ to develop a sense of fashion?

They wait a little longer, just for good measure. And the realisation is dawning over her.

“Oh my G—” Mercy cuts herself off, feeling that incandescent fury rising up inside her again, strangling in her throat. Her fingers tighten on Augustine’s, hard enough to crush bone. “He lied. That fucker lied, _again!!_ I killed him and shed my stupid fucking tears and the sun didn’t go out, the planets haven’t died, the world still persists _without him_ —”

What fools they were to believe him. It had seemed such a natural assumption at the time: he had started the sun again, like CPR on a dying solar system, and so it had seemed inconceivable that it could go on without him. Surely his beating heart was what kept the rest of it beating, just like he’d always told them.

But that, after all, was just another piece of self-aggrandizing mythology.

What an absolute _narcissist_.

“What happens now?” a small voice speaks up, asks, and she realises that it’s Ianthe. Looking more haggard than ever, gobs of bee ichor in her wheat-blonde hair. Mercy rolls her shoulders, feeling lost and adrift.

The universe has kept going. She killed God. And she doesn’t even get to self-combust. She’s still lost when there’s a sudden pressure on her hand, bone grinding along bone, and she realises Augustine is still hanging onto her. And she knows his looks well enough that she can read his expression, that set to his jaw whenever he’s handed a particularly long book or a tangled theorem. It’s the way he looks whenever there’s a puzzle to solve, a task to be undertaken. Time to roll up the sleeves and get to it.

There’s still work to do.

“The Emperor is dead,” Augustine says, and he looks at her. At himself. At their intertwined hands, and then he adds, a little sad and bitter and so very, very tired:

“The Emperor is dead. Long live the Emperor.”

===

Impia tortorum longos hic turba furores  
Sanguinis innocui, non satiata, aluit.  
Sospite nunc patria, fracto nunc funeris antro,  
Mors ubi dira fuit vita salusque patent.

Transl. _Here an unholy mob of torturers with an insatiable thirst for innocent blood, once fed their long frenzy. Now our homeland is safe, the funereal cave destroyed, and life and health appear where dreadful death once was._

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Brown Bird's "Down to the River", which is just so inutterably fitting that I have to share:
>
>> But I went down to the fires of insufferable sin  
> Lord, I tried, but the devil wouldn’t let me come in  
> Unholy trust has been broken  
> He don’t know on which side I stand  
> There ain’t no room among the damned for such a broken and a penitent man
>> 
>> And then my good woman rises from her sickness in bed  
> Puts her hands on my thighs and plants a kiss on my head  
> Says if the water won’t have ya, if the devil’s too blind  
> I know that truly you were meant to be mine  
> And then she takes me by the hand and shows me how to leave my worries behind
>> 
>> I've been down to the river of insufferable sins  
> Lord, I tried, but the water wouldn’t let me come in  
> Too many lives have been broken  
> There’s too much blood on my hands  
> Only one soul in this whole world would have me just the goddamned way that I am


End file.
